2010 Election Watch: Security of Your Electronic Voting Machine

Throughout most of the 20th century, voters went to a polling station, entered a booth, and pulled a lever or used a pencil to select candidates on a ballot. Then came the November 2000 elections, when talk of recounts and hanging chads swept the nation. "After that debacle," says Dan Wallach, a computer scientist and voting-system expert at Rice University in Houston, "there was pressure to ditch old, broken machines." This November voters will confront a dizzying array of systems that employ scanners, touchscreens, even audio recordings. Here's your guide to today's voting booth.

Model 100 Precinct Scanner (Election Systems & Software)

Model 100 Precinct Scanner (Election Systems & Software)

What It Is: Optical scanner

How It Works: A voter pencils in candidate selections on a paper ballot, then feeds the ballot into the scanner, where light from a row of LEDs reflects off the pencil marks. Sensors determine the locations of the marks and correlate them to the candidates. Then the Model 100 records the vote. If a voter selects no candidates, or more than one candidate for a single race, the Model 100 alerts the voter, and allows him or her to submit the ballot or retrieve it and correct the mistake.

Deployment: Nearly 30 million voters—more than half of all registered voters—will use the Model 100 in 747 jurisdictions in 30 states.

Reported Glitches: Introduced in the late 1990s, the Model 100 has miscounted votes or otherwise malfunctioned in several elections at polling stations in Texas, California, Arkansas and elsewhere. Since voters fill out paper ballots, however, election officials can recount votes if a machine is defective.

eScan (Hart InterCivic)

eScan (Hart InterCivic)

What It Is: Optical scanner

How It Works: Like the Model 100, the eScan reads marks on a paper ballot and stores the votes on a memory card. It also alerts voters if they don't mark the ballot in a contest or accidentally vote twice for, say, county coroner, and allows them to resubmit the ballot. At some polling stations, a plastic shield guarantees privacy as voters feed ballots into the machine.

Deployment: More than 6 million voters in 182 jurisdictions in eight states.

Reported Glitches:Dozens of eScan machines malfunctioned during a 2006 election in Lancaster County, PA, and the scanners often have trouble reading creased ballots.